| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: sight), without calling her to his side and hanging
all his atrocious weight on her shoulder. He would
not eat one single mouthful of food without her
close attendance. He had made himself helpless
beyond his affliction, to enslave her better. She
stood still for a moment, setting her teeth in the
dusk, then turned and walked slowly indoors.
Captain Hagberd went back to his spade. The
shouting in Carvil's cottage stopped, and after a
while the window of the parlour downstairs was lit
up. A man coming from the end of the street with
 To-morrow |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: prose romance. The purely critical spirit is, in most
novels, paramount. At the present moment we can recall one
man only, for whose works it would have been equally possible
to accomplish our present design: and that man is Hawthorne.
There is a unity, an unwavering creative purpose, about some
at least of Hawthorne's romances, that impresses itself on
the most indifferent reader; and the very restrictions and
weaknesses of the man served perhaps to strengthen the vivid
and single impression of his works. There is nothing of this
kind in Hugo: unity, if he attains to it, is indeed unity out
of multitude; and it is the wonderful power of subordination
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum: fall faster than the children walked, and he passed them on the way
down; but when he came to the glass pavement he alighted upon it so
softly that he was not even jarred.
"Well, well!" said Dorothy, drawing a long breath, "What a strange
country this is."
People began to come out of the glass doors to look at the new
arrivals, and pretty soon quite a crowd had assembled. There were men
and women, but no children at all, and the folks were all beautifully
formed and attractively dressed and had wonderfully handsome faces.
There was not an ugly person in all the throng, yet Dorothy was not
especially pleased by the appearance of these people because their
 Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz |